ordinance, your parliaments, by their decrees, proportion their
punishments to the guilt of the offenders; and your parliament of Normandy
has never, until the present time, found that its practice was different
from that of other courts; for all the books which treat upon this matter
cite an infinite number of decrees condemning witches to be burnt, or
broken on the wheel, or to other punishments. The following are
examples:--In the time of Chilperic, as may be seen in Gregory of Tours,
b. vi. c. 35 of his _History of France_; all the decrees of the parliament
of Paris passed according to, and in conformity with, this ancient
jurisprudence of the kingdom, cited by Imbert, in his _Judicial Practice_;
all those cited by Monstrelet, in 1459, against the witches of Artois; the
decrees of the same parliament, of the 13th of October 1573, against Mary
Le Fief, native of Saumur; of the 21st of October 1596, against the Sieur
de Beaumont, who pleaded, in his defence, that he had only sought the aid
of the devil for the purpose of unbewitching the afflicted and of curing
diseases; of the 4th of July 1606, against Francis du Bose; of the 20th of
July 1582, against Abel de la Rue, native of Coulommiers; of the 2d of
October 1593, against Rousseau and his daughter; of 1608, against another
Rousseau and one Peley, for witchcraft and adoration of the devil at the
Sabbath, under the figure of a he-goat, as confessed by them; the decree
of 4th of February 1615, against Leclerc, who appealed from the sentence
of the parliament of Orleans, and who was condemned for having attended
the Sabbath, and confessed, as well as two of his accomplices, who died in
prison, that he had adored the devil, renounced his baptism and his faith
in God, danced the witches' dance, and offered up unholy sacrifices; the
decrees of the 6th of May 1616, against a man named Leger, on a similar
accusation; the pardon granted by Charles IX. to Trois Echelles, upon
condition of revealing his accomplices, but afterwards revoked for renewed
sorcery on his part; the decree of the parliament of Paris, cited by
Mornac in 1595; the judgments passed in consequence of the commission
given by Henry IV. to the Sieur de l'Ancre, councillor of the parliament
of Bourdeaux; of the 20th of March 1619, against Etienne Audibert; those
passed by the chamber of Nerac, on the 26th of June 1620, against several
witches; those passed by the parliament of Toulouse in 1577, as cited by
Gregory Tolosanus, against four hundred persons accused of this crime, and
who were all marked with the sign of the devil. Besides all these, we
might recal to your majesty's recollection the various decrees of the
parliament of Provence, especially in the case of Gaufrédy in 1611; the
decrees of the parliament of Dijon, and those of the parliament of Rennes,
following the example of the condemnation of the Marshal de Rays, who was
burned in 1441, for the crime of witchcraft, in presence of the Duke of
Brittany;--all these examples, sire, prove that the accusation of
witchcraft has always been punished with death by the parliaments of your
kingdom, and justify the uniformity of their practice.
"These, sire, are the motives upon which your parliament of Normandy has
acted in decreeing the punishment of death against the persons lately
brought before it for this crime. If it has happened that, on any
occasion, these parliaments, and the parliament of Normandy among the
rest, have condemned the guilty to a less punishment than that of death,
it was for the reason that their guilt was not of the deepest dye; your
majesty, and the kings your predecessors, having left full liberty to the
various tribunals to whom they delegated the administration of justice, to
decree such punishment as was warranted by the evidence brought before
them.
"After so many authorities, and punishments ordained by human and divine
laws, we humbly supplicate your majesty to reflect once more upon the
extraordinary results which proceed from the malevolence of this sort of
people; on the deaths from unknown diseases, which are often the
consequences of their menaces, on the loss of the goods and chattels of
your subjects, on the proofs of guilt continually afforded by the
insensibility of the marks upon the accused, on the sudden transportation
of bodies from one place to another, on the sacrifices and nocturnal
assemblies, and other facts, corroborated by the testimony of ancient and
modern authors, and verified by so many eye-witnesses, composed partly of
accomplices, and partly of people who had no interest in the trials beyond
the love of truth, and confirmed, moreover, by the confessions of the
accused parties themselves; and that, sire, with so much agreement and
conformity between the different cases, that the most ignorant persons
convicted of this crime have spoken to the same circumstances, and in
nearly the same words, as the most celebrated authors who have written
about it, all of which may be easily proved to your majesty's satisfaction
by the records of various trials before your parliaments.
"These, sire, are truths so intimately bound up with the principles of our
religion, that, extraordinary although they be, no person has been able to
this time to call them in question. If some have cited, in opposition to
these truths, the pretended canon of the Council of Ancyre, and a passage
from St. Augustin, in a treatise upon the _Spirit and the Soul_, it has
been without foundation; and it would be easy to convince your majesty
that neither the one nor the other ought to be accounted of any authority;
and, besides that, the canon, in this sense, would be contrary to the
opinion of all succeeding councils of the Church, Cardinal Baronius, and
all learned commentators agree that it is not to be found in any old
edition. In effect, in those editions wherein it is found, it is in
another language, and is in direct contradiction to the twenty-third canon
of the same council, which condemns sorcery, according to all preceding
constitutions. Even supposing that this canon was really promulgated by
the Council of Ancyre, we must observe that it was issued in the second
century, when the principal attention of the Church was directed to the
destruction of paganism. For this reason, it condemns that class of women
who said they could pass through the air, and over immense regions, with
Diana and Herodias, and enjoins all preachers to teach the falsehood of
such an opinion, in order to deter people from the worship of these false
divinities; but it does not question the power of the devil over the human
body, which is, in fact, proved by the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ
himself. And with regard, sire, to the pretended passage of St. Augustin,
everybody knows that it was not written by him, because the writer,
whoever he was, cites Boetius, who died more than eighty years after the
time of St. Augustin. Besides, there is still more convincing proof in the
fact, that the same father establishes the truth of witchcraft in all his
writings, and more particularly in his _City of God_; and in his first
volume, question the 25th, wherein he states that sorcery is a communion
between man and the devil, which all good Christians ought to look upon
with horror.
"Taking all these things into consideration, sire, the officers of your
parliament hope, from the justice of your majesty, that you will be
graciously pleased to receive the humble remonstrances they have taken the
liberty to make. They are compelled, for the acquittal of their own
consciences and in discharge of their duty, to make known to your majesty,
that the decrees they passed against the sorcerers and witches brought
before them, were passed after a mature deliberation on the part of all
the judges present, and that nothing has been done therein which is not
conformable to the universal jurisprudence of the kingdom, and for the
general welfare of your majesty's subjects, of whom there is not one who
can say that he is secure from the malevolence of such criminals. We
therefore supplicate your majesty to suffer us to carry into effect the
sentences we passed, and to proceed with the trial of the other persons
accused of the same crime; and that the piety of your majesty will not
suffer to be introduced during your reign an opinion contrary to the
principles of that holy religion for which you have always employed so
gloriously both your cares and your arms."
Louis, as we have already mentioned, paid no attention to this appeal. The
lives of the old women were spared, and prosecutions for mere witchcraft,
unconnected with other offences, were discontinued throughout France. In
1680 an act was passed for the punishment, not of witches, but of
pretenders to witchcraft, fortune-tellers, divineresses, and poisoners.
Thus the light broke in upon Germany, France, England, and Scotland about
the same time, gradually growing clearer and clearer till the middle of
the eighteenth century, when witchcraft was finally reckoned amongst
exploded doctrines, and the belief in it confined to the uttermost vulgar.
Twice, however, did the madness burst forth again as furious, while it
lasted, as ever it had been. The first time in Sweden, in 1669, and the
second in Germany so late as 1749. Both these instances merit particular
mention. The first is one of the most extraordinary upon record, and for
atrocity and absurdity is unsurpassed in the annals of any nation.
It having been reported to the king of Sweden that the little village of
Mohra, in the province of Dalecarlia, was troubled exceedingly with
witches, he appointed a commission of clergy and laymen to trace the
rumour to its source, with full powers to punish the guilty. On the 12th
of August 1669, the commissioners arrived in the bewitched village, to the
great joy of the credulous inhabitants. On the following day the whole
population, amounting to three thousand persons, assembled in the church.
A sermon was preached, "declaring the miserable case of those people that
suffered themselves to be deluded by the devil," and fervent prayer was
offered up that God would remove the scourge from among them.
[Illustration: LOUIS XIV.]
The whole assembly then adjourned to the rector's house, filling all the
street before it, when the king's commission was read, charging every
person who knew any thing of the witchery, to come forward and declare the
truth. A passion of tears seized upon the multitude; men, women, and
children began to weep and sob, and all promised to divulge what they had
heard or knew. In this frame of mind they were dismissed to their homes.
On the following day they were again called together, when the depositions
of several persons were taken publicly before them all. The result was
that seventy persons, including fifteen children, were taken into custody.
Numbers also were arrested in the neighbouring district of Elfdale. Being
put to the torture, they all confessed their guilt. They said they used to
go to a gravel-pit, that lay hard by the cross-way, where they put a vest
upon their heads, and danced "round and round and round about." They then
went to the cross-way, and called three times upon the devil; the first
time in a low still voice; the second, somewhat louder; and the third,
very loudly, with these words, "Antecessor, come, and carry us to
Blockula!" This invocation never failed to bring him to their view. He
generally appeared as a little old man, in a grey coat, with red and blue
stockings, with exceedingly long garters. He had besides a very
high-crowned hat, with bands of many-coloured linen enfolded about it, and
a long red beard that hung down to his middle.
The first question he put to them was, whether they would serve him soul
and body? On their answering in the affirmative, he told them to make
ready for the journey to Blockula. It was necessary to procure, in the
first place, "some scrapings of altars and filings of church clocks."
Antecessor then gave them a horn with some salve in it, wherewith they
anointed themselves. These preparations ended, he brought beasts for them
to ride upon,--horses, asses, goats, and monkeys; and giving them a
saddle, a hammer, and a nail, uttered the word of command, and away they
went. Nothing stopped them. They flew over churches, high walls, rocks,
and mountains, until they came to the green meadow where Blockula was
situated. Upon these occasions they carried as many children with them as
they could; for the devil, they said, "did plague and whip them if they
did not procure him children, insomuch that they had no peace or quiet for
him."
Many parents corroborated a part of this evidence, stating that their
children had repeatedly told them that they had been carried away in the
night to Blockula, where the devil had beaten them black and blue. They
had seen the marks in the morning, but they soon disappeared. One little
girl was examined, who swore positively that she was carried through the
air by the witches, and when at a great height she uttered the holy name
of Jesus. She immediately fell to the ground, and made a great hole in her
side. "The devil, however, picked her up, healed her side, and carried her
away to Blockula." She added (and her mother confirmed her statement),
that she had till that day "an exceeding great pain in her side." This was
a clencher, and the nail of conviction was driven home to the hearts of
the judges.
The place called Blockula, whither they were carried, was a large house,
with a gate to it, "in a delicate meadow, whereof they could see no end."
There was a very long table in it, at which the witches sat down; and in
other rooms "there were very lovely and delicate beds for them to sleep
upon."
After a number of ceremonies had been performed, by which they bound
themselves body and soul to the service of Antecessor, they sat down to a
feast composed of broth, made of colworts and bacon, oatmeal, bread and
butter, milk and cheese. The devil always took the chair, and sometimes
played to them on the harp or the fiddle while they were eating. After
dinner they danced in a ring, sometimes naked, and sometimes in their
clothes, cursing and swearing all the time. Some of the women added
particulars too horrible and too obscene for repetition.
Once the devil pretended to be dead, that he might see whether his people
regretted him. They instantly set up a loud wail, and wept three tears
each for him; at which he was so pleased, that he jumped up among them,
and hugged in his arms those who had been most obstreperous in their
sorrow.
Such were the principal details given by the children, and corroborated by
the confessions of the full-grown witches. Any thing more absurd was never
before stated in a court of justice. Many of the accused contradicted
themselves most palpably; but the commissioners gave no heed to
discrepancies. One of them, the parson of the district, stated in the
course of the inquiry, that on a particular night, which he mentioned, he
had been afflicted with a headache so agonising, that he could not account
for it otherwise than by supposing he was bewitched. In fact, he thought a
score of witches must have been dancing on the crown of his head. This
announcement excited great horror among the pious dames of the auditory,
who loudly expressed their wonder that the devil should have power to hurt
so good a man. One poor witch, who lay in the very jaws of death,
confessed that she knew too well the cause of the minister's headache. The
devil had sent her with a sledge hammer and a large nail to drive into the
good man's skull. She had hammered at it for some time, but the skull was
so enormously _thick_, that she made no impression upon it. Every hand was
held up in astonishment. The pious minister blessed God that his skull was
so solid, and he became renowned for his thick head all the days of his
life. Whether the witch intended a joke does not appear, but she was
looked upon as a criminal more than usually atrocious. Seventy persons
were condemned to death on these so awful, yet so ridiculous confessions.
Twenty-three of them were burned together in one fire in the village of
Mohra, in the presence of thousands of delighted spectators. On the
following day fifteen children were murdered in the same manner, offered
up in sacrifice to the bloody Moloch of superstition. The remaining
thirty-two were executed at the neighbouring town of Fahluna. Besides
these, fifty-six children were found guilty of witchcraft in a minor
degree, and sentenced to various punishments, such as running the
gauntlet, imprisonment, and public whipping once a week for a twelvemonth.
Long after the occurrence of this case, it was cited as one of the most
convincing proofs upon record of the prevalence of witchcraft. When men
wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their
service! The lying whimsies of a few sick children, encouraged by foolish
parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbours, were sufficient to set
a country in a flame. If, instead of commissioners as deeply sunk in the
slough of ignorance as the people they were sent amongst, there had been
deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in understanding, how
different would have been the result! Some of the poor children who were
burned would have been sent to an infirmary; others would have been well
flogged; the credulity of the parents would have been laughed at; and the
lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in
Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more
such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect as the one just
cited.
In New England, about the same time, the colonists were scared by similar
stories of the antics of the devil. All at once a fear seized upon the
multitude, and supposed criminals were arrested day after day in such
numbers, that the prisons were found too small to contain them. A girl
named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac and subject
to fits, imagined that an old Irish woman, named Glover, had bewitched
her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was apparently a
predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that
the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were
so stiff that they could not be moved; while at others, said the
neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones appeared softened into
sinews. The supposed witch was seized, and as she could not repeat the
Lord's Prayer without making a mistake in it, she was condemned and
executed.
But the popular excitement was not allayed. One victim was not enough; the
people waited agape for new disclosures. Suddenly two hysteric girls in
another family fell into fits daily, and the cry of witchcraft resounded
from one end of the colony to the other. The feeling of suffocation in the
throat, so common in cases of hysteria, was said by the patients to be
caused by the devil himself, who had stuck balls in the windpipe to choke
them. They felt the pricking of thorns in every part of the body, and one
of them vomited needles. The case of these girls, who were the daughter
and niece of a Mr. Parvis, the minister of a Calvinist chapel, excited so
much attention, that all the weak women in the colony began to fancy
themselves similarly afflicted. The more they brooded on it, the more
convinced they became. The contagion of this mental disease was as great
as if it had been a pestilence. One after the other the women fainted
away, asserting on their recovery that they had seen the spectres of
witches. Where there were three or four girls in a family, they so worked
each upon the diseased imagination of the other, that they fell into fits
five or six times in a day. Some related that the devil himself appeared
to them, bearing in his hand a parchment-roll, and promising that if they
would sign an agreement, transferring to him their immortal souls, they
should be immediately relieved from fits and all the ills of the flesh.
Others asserted that they saw witches only, who made them similar
promises, threatening that they should never be free from aches and pains
till they had agreed to become the devil's. When they refused, the witches
pinched, or bit, or pricked them with long pins and needles. More than two
hundred persons named by these mischievous visionaries were thrown into
prison. They were of all ages and conditions of life, and many of them of
exemplary character. No less than nineteen were condemned and executed
before reason returned to the minds of the colonists. The most horrible
part of this lamentable history is, that among the victims there was a
little child only five years old. Some women swore that they had seen it
repeatedly in company with the devil, and that it had bitten them often
with its little teeth for refusing to sign a compact with the evil one. It
can hardly increase our feelings of disgust and abhorrence when we learn
that this insane community actually tried and executed a dog for the same
offence!
One man, named Cory, stoutly refused to plead to the preposterous
indictment against him. As was the practice in such cases, he was pressed
to death. It is told of the Sheriff of New England, who superintended the
execution, that when this unhappy man thrust out his tongue in his mortal
agony, he seized hold of a cane, and crammed it back again into the mouth.
If ever there were a fiend in human form, it was this sheriff: a man who,
if the truth were known, perhaps plumed himself upon his piety--thought he
was doing God good service, and
"Hoped to merit heaven by making earth a hell!"
Arguing still in the firm belief of witchcraft, the bereaved people began
to inquire, when they saw their dearest friends snatched away from them by
these wide-spreading accusations, whether the whole proceedings were not
carried on by the agency of the devil. Might not the great enemy have put
false testimony into the mouths of the witnesses, or might not the
witnesses be witches themselves? Every man who was in danger of losing his
wife, his child, or his sister, embraced this doctrine with avidity. The
revulsion was as sudden as the first frenzy. All at once, the colonists
were convinced of their error. The judges put a stop to the prosecutions,
even of those who had confessed their guilt. The latter were no sooner at
liberty than they retracted all they had said, and the greater number
hardly remembered the avowals which agony had extorted from them. Eight
persons, who had been tried and condemned, were set free; and gradually
girls ceased to have fits and to talk of the persecutions of the devil.
The judge who had condemned the first criminal executed on this charge,
was so smitten with sorrow and humiliation at his folly, that he set apart
the anniversary of that day as one of solemn penitence and fasting. He
still clung to the belief in witchcraft; no new light had broken in upon
him on that subject, but, happily for the community, the delusion had
taken a merciful turn. The whole colony shared the feeling; the jurors on
the different trials openly expressed their penitence in the churches; and
those who had suffered were regarded as the victims, and not as the
accomplices of Satan.
It is related that the Indian tribes in New England were sorely puzzled at
the infatuation of the settlers, and thought them either a race inferior
to, or more sinful than the French colonists in the vicinity, amongst
whom, as they remarked, "the Great Spirit sent no witches."
Returning again to the continent of Europe, we find that, after the year
1680, men became still wiser upon this subject. For twenty years the
populace were left to their belief, but governments in general gave it no
aliment in the shape of executions. The edict of Louis XIV. gave a blow to
the superstition, from which it never recovered. The last execution in the
Protestant cantons of Switzerland was at Geneva, in 1652. The various
potentates of Germany, although they could not stay the trials, invariably
commuted the sentence into imprisonment, in all cases where the pretended
witch was accused of pure witchcraft, unconnected with any other crime. In
the year 1701, Thomasius, the learned professor at the University of
Halle, delivered his inaugural thesis, _De Crimine Magiæ_ which struck
another blow at the falling monster of popular error. But a faith so
strong as that in witchcraft was not to be eradicated at once: the
arguments of learned men did not penetrate to the villages and hamlets;
but still they achieved great things; they rendered the belief an
unworking faith, and prevented the supply of victims, on which for so many
ages it had battened and grown strong.
Once more the delusion broke out; like a wild beast wounded to the death,
it collected all its remaining energies for the final convulsion, which
was to shew how mighty it had once been. Germany, which had nursed the
frightful error in its cradle, tended it on its death-bed, and Würzburg,
the scene of so many murders on the same pretext, was destined to be the
scene of the last. That it might lose no portion of its bad renown, the
last murder was as atrocious as the first. This case offers a great
resemblance to that of the witches of Mohra and New England, except in the
number of its victims. It happened so late as the year 1749, to the
astonishment and disgust of the rest of Europe.
[Illustration: VIEW IN WÜRZBURG.]